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		<title>The Kingdom of Tonga &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2015/10-October/04.xhtml&gt;</title>
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			<h1>The Kingdom of Tonga</h1>
			<p>Day 00211: <time>Sunday, 2015 October 04</time></p>
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<p>
	I spent most of the day preparing for tomorrow by scoping out the local mall and writing up a resume.
	My resume isn&apos;t great, but it&apos;s better than nothing and I&apos;ve been jobless far too long.
</p>
<p>
	Before heading off to bed, I wanted to make at least a little progress on my <abbr title="country code top-level domain">ccTLD</abbr> research, so I decided to check registries until I found a single registry that allowed registration without a telephone number.
	It only took two tries to find such a registry: the registry running the <abbr title="country code top-level domain">ccTLD</abbr> of the <a href="/en/URI_research/ccTLDs.xhtml#to">Kingdom of Tonga</a>.
	Their registration form doesn&apos;t ask for a telephone number, not even in the section that takes credit card information.
	I found this quite odd because I&apos;ve never seen a credit card information form that did not require a telephone number; I simply though that the credit card processing protocol required this.
	I always entered a fictitious number and Discover, not having a telephone number on file for me to match it against, processed the transaction without problems.
</p>
<p>
	It appears that there is a <a href="http://to/">website run on the <abbr title="Top Level Domain">TLD</abbr> itself</a>.
	I knew this was technically possible, I just didn&apos;t know anyone was actually doing it.
	The strange thing though is that the webserver that serves this website is sending a default, unconfigured website without any content.
	Aside from the lack of content, this is actually something I want to do someday myself.
	Once I&apos;m doing a lot better financially, I want to acquire my own three-character <abbr title="Top Level Domain">TLD</abbr>.
	Alternatively, if someone has acquired a single-character <abbr title="Top Level Domain">TLD</abbr> by that time, I wouldn&apos;t mind instead acquiring a single-character <abbr title="Second Level Domain">SLD</abbr> under their <abbr title="Top Level Domain">TLD</abbr>.
	After that, of course, I would aim to try to become the manager of a second-level domain.
	This would be a precarious position for me to be in though, if I stupidly gave up both my three-character name and this name.
	I am not a country, nor will I ever be.
	I also don&apos;t have what it takes to lead a country.
	If I end up in control of a <abbr title="country code top-level domain">ccTLD</abbr>, it will be in a partnership in which I have offered to try to increase profits for whatever country I have partnered with.
	They could end the partnership at any time.
	Likewise, I would be required to sell domains, not keep the name space to myself.
	I might be able to put a website at the <abbr title="Top Level Domain">TLD</abbr> itself, but aside from that, the domain would be in pieces, sold to any willing buyer.
	Next, I would want to control a single-character domain.
	If I recall, <abbr title="Internet Assigned Numbers Authority">IANA</abbr> said something about single-character <abbr title="Top Level Domain">TLD</abbr>s being reserved for uses that would benefit the public well.
	Again, me having a personal name space doesn&apos;t really accomplish anything for the public, so I wouldn&apos;t in any realistic situation be able to actually own and control a single-character <abbr title="Top Level Domain">TLD</abbr>.
	Stepping even further in this fantasy, the final step would be to take control of <abbr title="Internet Assigned Numbers Authority">IANA</abbr> and the root name space: <code>.</code>.
	At this point, everything pretty much falls apart on a technical level.
	Forgetting the sheer impossibility of getting enough authority to make this happen, if I control all the names, names become useless.
	No one will have <abbr title="Domain Name System">DNS</abbr> names besides me, so no one will use <abbr title="Domain Name System">DNS</abbr>.
	Besides, I don&apos;t want to have a monopoly on names, that would just be evil.
	That is, unless someone creates a new <abbr title="Domain Name System">DNS</abbr> root, in which case, I immediately lose everything.
	And do all protocols even work using the root domain? The <abbr title="Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure">HTTPS</abbr> <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr> scheme is &quot;https://{domain without trailing dot}{path}&quot;.
	A website at the root domain would therefore have a <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr> of <code>https:///</code>.
	Would the triple slash mean that the website was hosted at the root domain, or would it be an invalid <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr> that didn&apos;t even specify a host? If I decided not to encrypt things, <code>http://./</code> would be a completely-valid <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr>, but a lack of encryption isn&apos;t safe.
</p>
<p>
	In any case, fantasies can be fun, even if I do over-analyze them to the point where they become incoherent and fall apart.
</p>
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	My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
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